Home hunters now expect to go online and control much of their search -- and real estate industry leaders have gathered in San Francisco this week, hoping to use that technological trend to their advantage.
Real Estate Connect, the real estate industry's largest technology conference, drew more than 1,700 people to a three-day conference that ends today at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, about 500 more than attended the event last year, organizers said.
It's a reflection of what's happening in the real estate market. The past 12 months has seen the launch of innovative new services such as Redfin and Zillow, which offer ordinary people access to home-related data once reserved for real estate professionals. Traditional brokerages have increasingly struck technology deals that they hope will help them deliver better service online and in person.
The show floor at Real Estate Connect is where some of those deals get started.
``The role of technology in real estate is becoming much more widely recognized,'' said Mike Edelhart, chief executive of Inman News, an Emeryville company that has held the conference for 10 years. In 2005, a company's marketing director might have attended the event, he said, but this year chief executives and whole development teams came.
``They feel they have to implement the technology. It's not theoretical anymore,'' Edelhart said.
Real estate is big business, and technology companies are eager to get further into it.
Last year, real estate agents, property managers and leasing agents did nearly $1.6 trillion in business nationwide, up from about $1.5 trillion in 2004, said Steve Cochrane of Economy.com. The value of the services they provide equals about 12.5 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.
Companies exhibiting their wares ranged from small start-ups to known names that have raised millions in venture capital -- think Zillow, which recently raised another $25 million, or Reply of Walnut Creek with $17 million.
Topics of discussion at the conference included how real estate agents can use blogs in their businesses, the virtues of including aerial maps on broker Web sites, and how sites that combine e-commerce and classified advertising -- such as local company LiveDeal, based in Santa Clara -- might affect the industry.
Numerous companies either have or will soon offer detailed information about a home's sales history, square footage and number of rooms -- evidence that the kind of property information rare online just a year ago is becoming a commodity consumers will expect from brokerages.
``There's a feeding frenzy,'' said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a Seattle-based online brokerage now operating in the Bay Area, as businesses attempt to add more features to their sites.
The show proved to him that competition will be fierce in the future, not just from other technology-oriented start-ups, but from big traditional brokerages, too.
``They're not just going to sit there and let us build a better Web site,'' he said.
Mark Brandemuehl, vice president of marketing for Movoto.com, a Palo Alto-based brokerage that launched late last year, agreed that tremendous innovation is happening in the online real estate world now, but cautioned that ``how much of it is good for the consumer and how much of it is just smart technology people doing what they did in the late '90s, is a question.''
In past years at the conference, the traditional real estate industry felt threatened by the plethora of new business models encroaching on its territory. No longer, said Jim Liptak, a Realtor from Paso Robles and treasurer of the California Association of Realtors.
``It showcases opportunity. Change is not to be feared,'' he said.
